Slack May Not Be Right for Your Team

Slack Everywhere

By now you may have noticed that Slack is everywhere. The Sky Floor has multiple clients who use Slack for inter-office communication, project collaboration, and file sharing. They rely on Slack for the ease of communication. They love it as a way to keep in touch without having to break away from the desk in the middle of tasks. There is one glaring problem:

Slack has a limit of 10,000 saved messages for the free plan.

Many businesses read ten-thousand and underestimate how quickly they will arrive at that number.

When you first read it, it sounds astronomical. You feel like if you hit 10,000 messages your team with will have achieved the tipping point of Slack mastery (assuming each Slack messages takes an hour to craft). Maybe your team will unlock psychic Slack and no longer need keyboards to input their musings!

Lunch Slackers

10,000 isn’t all that much once the 50th, “who wants to grab lunch” conversation unfolds with its deliberations of where to go, who will drive and if tacos are best consumed on Tuesdays or Thursdays. Social activity is what Slack is perfect for! Once you are over those 10,000 messages, you will not care that you cannot see who drove to that ill-fated taco lunch six months ago. You will, however, miss the lost thread that had notes from your meetings for a project that started six months ago and is now wrapping up.

Taken Hostage

Don’t worry. Slack has not erased your messages and files, but they are holding them hostage. Now you have to pay up or never see your old messages again!

What are the alternatives?

Basecamp 3Basecamp 3 is a favorite of ours because it combines file management, live chat, discussion threads, calendar and to-do lists in one application. You have to pay for it, but it can facilitate what takes several other professional apps to accomplish saving you time and money.

AsanaLike Basecamp this is a useful project management tool. It has cute animations when specific actions occur which is a fun touch. The interface is a bit more confusing than Basecamp to us, but it is a very serviceable option. Plus is has a free tier.

There are a ton of other project management tools, especially in the enterprise space. We use Basecamp for project management and have liked it. It saves time, and we know that all our data is there when we need it later and it doesn’t require a year long contract with onboarding ‘customer success managers’.

By all means, keep Slacking, but keep it to where to grab tacos. Moreover, remember that if you are on the free Slack plan, you may become a hostage of freemium app monetization.

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